Mensch•Mark For Elul 24: Knowing One's Place - Makir et Mekomo
We’re always coming or we’re going. So where is home? Is it a geographical location? Or is it where, “when you have to go there, they have to let you in?” Psalm 137 provides the answer.
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About the Mensch•Mark Series
The Talmudic tractate Avot, 6:6 provides a roadmap as to how to live an ethical life. This passage includes 48 middot (measures) through which we can “acquire Torah.” See the full list here. For each of these days of reflection, running from the first of Elul through Yom Kippur, I’m highlighting one of these middot, in order to assist each of us in the process of soul searching (“heshbon ha-nefesh”).
Today’s Middah:
Knowing One's Place - Middah Makir et Mekomo
URJ’s Take:
Text
"Mark well these three things, and you will not fall into the clutches of sin. Know where you came from, where you are going, and to whom you are destined to give an account and reckoning." (Akavyah ben Mahalalel, Pirkei Avot, 3:1)
Commentary
Our text, taken from Pirkei Avot, serves as a reminder that part of maintaining a balance in life is knowing and accepting our own place in the larger scheme of things. (Voices of Wisdom, Klagsbrun, p.6) The text goes on to suggest that we all begin and end our lives in exactly the same way and that we are all ultimately accountable to God.
"Knowing who you are and knowing what your place is, can lead you to knowing who and what you want to become. You may need to strive to become the person you want to become. Striving for something is not necessarily contradictory to "knowing your place" as long as your striving is not mean spirited and you do not hurt others and destroy relationships along the way." (Teaching Jewish Virtues, p.211)
According to Tiferes Yisrael, makir et mekomo (knowing one's place) refers to self-knowledge. One must have an honest estimate of oneself, and recognize one's own inadequacies in order to be ready to strive for more Torah knowledge and wisdom. The Maharal writes: “Only one who senses he is lacking something will seek out the Torah, which brings completion to the incomplete.” (The Pirkei Avos Treasury, p.418)
Each of us is unique. Knowing your place means understanding what it is that makes you different from everyone else you know. The following Chasidic story, told in the form of a riddle, helps to illustrate this point.
A man said to Mendel of Kotzk: "This one is greater than that one." He replied, "Why make comparisons? If I am I because I am I, and you are you because you are you, then I am truly I and you are truly you. But if I am I only because you are you, and if you are you only because I am I, then I am not I, and you are not you." (Day by Day, p.56)
Rabbi Susan Freeman cautions us that it is easy to become arrogant and judgmental about the world around you and to look down on some people. But the knowledge that all people and things have their place can help you be more accepting of your place in the world. (Teaching Jewish Virtues, Freeman, p.219) The Talmudic sage, Ben Azzai, offered similar advice when he said: "Do not despise anyone. Do not underrate the importance of anything, for there is no one that does not have his/her hour, and there is no thing that does not have its place." (Pirkei Avot4:3)
MY TAKE - Adapted from 2014 and 2005 sermons on the meaning of home (and now that I have just moved after 37 years in the same community, and in light of the horrors of the past year, a new chapter is being written as we speak).
Where would you go if you knew you only had a few weeks to live?
In an essay in The London Review of Books, called “On Not Going Home,” James Wood relates how he asked Christopher Hitchens, long before Hitchens was terminally ill, where he would go if he had only a few weeks to live. Would he stay in America? “No,” he said, “I’d go to Dartmoor, in southern England, without a doubt.” It was the landscape of his childhood.
Roger Cohen of the New York Times, reflecting on this response, commented, “It was the landscape of unfiltered experience, of things felt rather than thought through, of the world in its beauty absorbed before it is understood, of patterns and sounds that lodge themselves in some indelible place in the psyche and call out across the years.”
I guess that might be what we call “home,” and the question “where are you” invariably dissolves into the question, “where is your home?” Or, in the vernacular of a current beer commercial, “Where is your beach?
Wood’s essay explores a certain form of contemporary homelessness — lives lived without the finality of exile, but also without the familiarity of home. A sort of limbo, or what Cohen calls “displacement anguish.”
We’re always coming or we’re going. We’re never THERE.
So where is home? Is it a geographical location? Or is it, as Robert Frost put it, the place where, “when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
I thought about this several months back (in 2014) when I brought my mother down to the Jewish Home in Fairfield. It was just getting impossible to visit her as often as I would like. But in taking her out of the Boston area, where she had lived for her entire life, I was not only displacing her, but displacing a little of myself too. When I visited her up there, it was a schlep, but it was MY schlep. I felt a sense of peace and familiarity as I drove on that turnpike from Sturbridge to Boston. I’ve very little family left up there, and haven’t actually lived there since the governor was Michael Dukakis. But it’s still home.
“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox in America,” wrote Thomas Wolfe in his novel You Can’t Go Home Again, “that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.”
A name for God is “Hamakom,” literally, the place. When we comfort mourners we say “May Hamakom grant you comfort among the mourners of Zion. May you sense that comfort wherever this journey of grief and healing may take you.” May God be with you, everywhere.
Wherever we are, we need to keep moving. When we stay put for too long it is all too easy to get stuck. But while we keep moving forward, we remain grounded by taking home with us, within us.
I have a homeland: Israel. I have a home country: the US. I have a home state – Connecticut and I have a home team (all things Boston) - and I have an ancestral home, a house in Brookline that my parents bought when I was born, where I first walked and rode a bike and took jump shots in the backyard, and where my father died in his bed - and I still have the key to the house I grew up in, which was sold a lifetime ago. I take it with me everywhere.
But where is my home?
Wherever I happen to be right now.
The book of Psalms is a remarkable collection of poems encompassing the complete range of human emotion, the full spectrum of life experience.
So we look at this one, Psalm 137, and wonder what can be so healing about it.
1. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, we also wept, when we remembered Zion. 2. We hung our lyres on the willows in its midst. 3. For there those who carried us away captive required of us a song; and those who tormented us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. 4. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? 5. If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. 6. If I do not remember you, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. 7. Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem; who said, Raze it, raze it, to its foundation. 8. O daughter of Babylon, you are to be destroyed! Happy shall he be, who repays you for what you have done to us! 9. Happy shall he be, who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!
Ancient Babylon, with its hanging gardens and spectacular ziggurats was a metropolitan marvel. Herodotus, a historian in 450 BCE wrote, "Babylon surpasses in splendor any city in the known world." But for the Jews, brought there after the destruction of the first temple in 586 BCE, this was their first dispersion, the first Exile. King Nebuchadnezzar’s Army Corps of Engineers had constructed a massive network of canals and aqueducts feeding from the Euphrates. These were the “Rivers of Babylon,” where the Jews sat and wept for Zion. This system of canals, ironically, ultimately proved the city’s undoing when the army of the Persian King Cyrus was able to conquer Babylon fifty years later. Because the massive rivers had been drained in order to create these canals, the Persians were able to wade in the waste deep waters and enter the city.
The psalmist probably knew that when Psalm 137 was written. For this poem takes the Jews on a journey from Exile to restoration, from powerless and homelessness to the promise of return. It begins by those rivers, where the tormentors forced the Jews to sing songs of their home. But singing those songs was just what they needed. For in doing so, they learned how to sing the songs of Adonai on alien soil. It’s not easy to do that. But they did it. They set up entirely new institutions so that they would not forget Jerusalem. They called them synagogues. They set up Hebrew Schools. They wrote down from memory all the stories and laws that had sustained them back home, all those things they took for granted all those centuries. They painted verbal pictures of what life was like back there in Jerusalem, so their children would not forget. They collected all these stories and laws and customs into a single scroll, which they called the Torah. And these people came to be known by an entirely new name. They were called Jews. And that Torah they wrote would begin with the letter bet, the letter that means (and looks like) “home.”
All this happened by the rivers of Babylon. In the face of utter homelessness, they faced Jerusalem and held it up above their chiefest joy. Disregarding their sorry lot and defying their tormentors, they forged a new destiny. And then, and then, the enemy was destroyed and redemption was at hand. Psalm 137 is truly a snapshot of a single moment of triumph in Jewish history. The triumph of memory. This psalm marks the moment when the home team learned how to win on the road.
But in choosing it for his special collection of healing psalms, Nachman of Bratzlav chose to look at Psalm 137 not historically but as a metaphor for the struggles that go on in the soul – in every individual soul, and certainly in his own tormented one. In verses 1-4 the poet stands in a deep personal state of exile. Nothing is normal. Nothing looks familiar. “I’m feeling so lost. I’m the New Orleans refugee, the Gazan settler, the London commuter – the freshman in college or the ten year old at camp. Or I’ve just broken up with my girlfriend of two years, or my husband of 20. Or I’ve just discovered that my body has been invaded by leukemia; or my father has just died. Wherever I am, I am sitting by those rivers, where even the willows weep. How can I possibly sing my old songs? I play my stereo, but the songs don’t help.”
The come verses 5 and 6 and suddenly, things change. Something is working. I’ve discovered something. I’ve discovered resolve. I’ve discovered that memory and will are a powerful combination. I DO remember Jerusalem. I DO remember joy. And I do remember that if I DON’T remember, no one else will help me. Only I can overcome this – and I… can. My right hand (or, to be PC for we lefties, my left hand) so limp for so long, slowly, slowly…forms a fist. ,
I’m using that hand again. I’m writing again! I’m pumping iron – I’m getting back into shape – and my tongue – I’m talking again – verbalizing the pain – letting it out.
Then come the last three verses. “I am strong. I have lifted myself up from the river bank and I see that, indeed, I am NOT alone. God is there!” --What we mean by “God” here, by the way, is simply that I am not alone. I am connected. The forces around me and within me are being marshaled to defeat the enemy – the cancer, the loneliness, the rootlessness, the alienation, the cynicism, the anger, the exhaustion, the hatred. And we’re not only going to defeat that enemy, we’re going to obliterate it at its roots – even it’s potential recurrence, its “children,” will be crushed against the rock. The hopelessness ITSELF will be drained of hope. The rootlessness ITSELF will be uprooted.
That is how Psalm 137 can speak to us – and how it can heal us.
May that day soon come to pass when the homeless and hopeless shall weep by the river no more.
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